2024 Fun Comics Advent Calendar, Day 15: Fargield

Garfield is not here to amuse you.

 

Garfield parodies are, let's say, extremely common on the internet. This is another one. What can I say? I have a weakness for the classics. Jim Davis' comic strip has been running so long and has become so ubiquitous in our culture that it's only natural for people to want to subvert it somehow. That's just how people's minds work. Naturally, I've done some Garf-inspired stuff over the years, and not all of it has been posted to my blog. Here are a couple more examples:

His logic is airtight. Can't argue with that.

It's Garfield Lacking Garfield.

Okay, that last one is clearly inspired by Garfield Minus Garfield. I don't know if they've done that exact strip already, but I just wanted to do my own version. I just liked the image of the flea counter sitting on the countertop.

A whole year's worth of comics parodies and mashups!

A gloomy year demands a gloomy header image.

As recently as 2019, comic parodies were a regular feature on this blog. Then, without warning, they vanished altogether. What happened? Well, it's like this. Up until about December of last year, I was an active participant in a Facebook forum devoted to newspaper comics. I shared my various mashups and parodies there and then collected them into occasional blog posts here at Dead 2 Rights. When I gave up on the Facebook forum, I stopped doing comics-related posts on this blog, too.

But I never stopped reading newspaper comics or doing parodies of them. I just don't do them in such great quantities as I used to. Now it's late December, and I have a folder on my hard drive full to bursting with comics, so I thought I'd share them all at once. Sound good to you? Let's go.

Oh dear. It's time for another comics roundup.

"Take that, you judgmental old biddy!"

The comics, like the waterfalls, never stop. That's a big part of their charm, the constancy. Sure, the newspaper industry died at least ten years ago, and the last non-ironic reader of Judge Parker died twenty years ago. But does that mean King Features Syndicate should just stop paying people to write and draw Judge Parker? I hope not.

Anyway, I haven't done one of these comics roundups since February, and they've been building up on my computer, so I figured it was time. Past time, really.

Random cartoon time, gang!

For a while, there was an outbreak of mismatched hands in comic strips.Victims included Mark Trail and Wilbur Weston.

Happy day after Labor Day, everyone! And guess what? I have another backlog of comics and cartoons I want to delete off my hard drive, so I'm dumping them all into one big post here at Dead 2 Rights. Enjoy or don't. It's your call. Either way, after today, they're gonzo.

Let's light this candle.

This is just a bunch of comics parodies and remixes, okay?

This book never existed, but don't you kind of remember it in bookstores anyway?

Look, I'll level with you. I was going through the images saved to my hard drive, deciding which ones to chuck, and I found some  comics parodies that I hadn't posted here yet. So I wanted to collect them in one big post before deleting them from my computer forever. That's what this post is. There's nothing else to this, so don't expect any incisive commentary.

Fun in the sun with Mark Trail! (and a veritable panoply of high-larious comix!)

So I guess Mark is just nude to the waist.

How's the week been treating you? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Well, however it's been going, prepare for it to get just a little better. I have a whole new selection of fractured funnies to share with you. If you'll direct your eyes slightly upward, for instance, you'll see my latest Mark Trail adventure.

And here's one featuring that little dickhole dickens, Dennis the Menace:

Fundamentalists say the darnedest things.

Speaking of Dennis the Menace, here are a couple of parodies of a recent panel. I decided to remove Dennis and replace him with another, more appropriate character.

Corporate synergy FTW!

Another variation, one that possibly goes too far:

So Dennis is probably dead in this scenario.

For a change of pace, here's another edition of Family Circus Minus The Family. Isn't this peaceful and serene? I know the kitchen has two doors that hinge in incompatible directions, but try to look past that.

No malapropisms have ever been uttered here.

And finally, just for giggles, here's my attempt at constructing a typical newspaper comics page.

And no ink stains on your fingers either!

The Day Garfield Developed a Conscience

Let's replace Jon Arbuckle with the Prophet Muhammad and see what happens!

Muhammad may be a prophet, but his cat is a total loss if you ask me!

My guess is: absolutely nothing. What's your guess?

Jon Arbuckle is one sick mutha...

Jon knows how to keep the flame of love alive.

In recent years, Jim Davis' comic strip Garfield has relented somewhat in its depiction of the character Jon Arbuckle as a friendless, antisocial dweeb by giving him a seemingly-normal girlfriend named Liz, a veterinarian. That convention was taken over to the Garfield movies as well, with Jennifer Love Hewitt playing Liz to Breckin Meyer's Jon. This, to me, feels like a cheat, akin to the "bland nice guy" makeover former hothead David Seville got when the Chipmunks franchise was revived in the 1980s. This, too, was carted over to the live-action Chipmunks movies. So Dave is no longer a truly-scary rageaholic, and Jon doesn't necessarily spend his Saturday nights alone with his cat. Well, I say phooey to all this focus-group, audience-placating nonsense. I'm making these characters off-putting again, and I'm starting with Jon. So there!

Thought I'd erase Garfield from this 'Garfield' before 'Garfield Minus Garfield' does it.

A homemade Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just got home yesterday from Indiana, o my brothers and only friends. I was there visiting my sister and her family for the Memorial Day weekend. My dad came down from Michigan, so I got to see him, too. There's not much to do in this portion of Indiana, so we watched many hours of television and consumed mass quantities of starches, sugars, and fats. That helped pass the time. 

We also got out to the movies a couple of times. Finally caught up with The Avengers: Age of Ultron (a solid, if by-the-book superhero flick; a little more self-serious and hence maybe not as fun as the first one) and Mad Max: Fury Road (an expectation-shattering revelation; I may have to see it again before it leaves theaters). 

One of my favorite rituals of these family get-togethers is reading the comics with my niece and nephews. This time, I was able to introduce them to the pleasures of Garfield Minus Garfield, the Dadaist experimental comic which takes normal Garfield dailies and simply removes the title character, thus revealing the fat orange cat's pitiful owner, Jon Arbuckle, as the sad, twitchy lunatic he's always been. We read the original Garfield, too, and I found one that would make a perfect candidate for Garfield Minus Garfield. So before those guys could get their paws on it, I did my own version. You can see it above. Enjoy, and I'll catch you further along down the trail.

UPDATE: Garfield Minus Garfield did, in fact, publish its own version of this strip, several days after I posted mine. But they dropped Jon's third-panel word balloon, which to me makes it less funny. Better that he desperately plead to nobody. Advantage: Joe.

17 Astonishing and Obscure Facts to Amuse Your Friends and Dazzle Your Enemies

Garfield stands on his hind legs... like a man!

Trivia. Whether you're appearing on a quiz show or just trying to make sparkling conversation at a dinner party, there's nothing like it. And yet, there never seems to be enough trivia around when you need it. Fortunately, Dead 2 Rights is here to help. Below, you will find 17 trivial statements which you are welcome to use in any social or professional situation. Enjoy!

• If you could drive your car straight upwards, you probably wouldn't want to.

• George Washington was never President of the United States. The rumor that he held this nation's highest office dogged him to the end of his days.

• Strictly speaking, berries are not berries, but cabbages are.

• There is no "i' in "March."

• If the sun were hollow, we'd all be in a great deal of trouble.

• Contrary to that old wives' tale, cats do in fact feel pain.

• "Hullabaloo" isn't Latin for anything in particular.

• That country between Spain and Germany? Surprise! It's France!

• The melting point of iron is a mystery which science has yet to solve.

• The earliest library card dates back to the time of Christ. The first book checked out was Garfield At Large by Jim Davis.

• Napoleon's last word was "bonkers."

• Without adjusting for inflation, items today cost much more than they did a hundred years ago.

• Former astronaut Neil Armstrong sadly wound up a derelict.

• Saying "celery soup" into a mirror three times is entirely safe and will have no unfortunate consequences. Try it yourself and see!

• Though famous for his plays, William Shakespeare would rather be remembered for his astonishing sexual prowess.

• Experts agree that the funniest word in the English language is "belch."

• Even the strongest ant is no match for a full-grown man.

Feel free to add your own in the comments section. Feel just as free not to add your own in the comments section.

A new diversion: 'Marvin' minus thought balloons

Marvin minus all those pesky jokes and stories.

Since 1982, Tom Armstrong's Marvin has been sullying newspaper comics pages with the dreary, laughless adventures of an obnoxious child, Marvin Miller, who remains disturbingly unable to develop past infancy. He should be in his early thirties by now, but he still looks and behaves like a preschooler. Doomed to spend eternity in diapers, the boy obsesses gleefully over his own feces and the discomfort it causes in others.

Most of the strip's alleged humor derives, in fact, from the child's copious and foul excretions, though Marvin's selfishness, penchant for destruction, and fearsome temper are important components of the strip as well. Marvin's weary, utterly defeated parents, Jeff and Jenny, bear the brunt of Marvin's wrath; their unenviable fate is to forever tend to the monster they themselves created.

Aesthetically, Marvin is an obvious derivative of Jim Davis' Garfield, with the pudgy, flame-haired child a mere stand-in for the famously overfed orange tabby. Deprived of the ability to speak, both Marvin and Garfield "communicate" through thought bubbles. The other humans in these strips should not be able to hear or understand these thoughts, unless they possess telepathic skills, and yet many of the jokes in Marvin and Garfield rely on just such telepathy.

I wondered what would happen if Tom Armstrong removed these thought bubbles from Marvin. What would the strip look like without them? The answers are seen above. Marvin becomes the story of a mostly-happy, forever-mute child who occasionally changes his facial expression for no apparent reason.

What if 'Heathcliff' were written by Charles Manson? I think it would go SOMETHING like this...

If you don't know what this is referencing, then congratulations on being young and well-adjusted.

"Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no one should terrorize the neighborhood."

-lyrics to the Heathcliff theme song from the 1980s

Typical Heathcliff nonsense.

Heathcliff is often dismissed as an off-brand, downmarket Garfield wannabe, but this comparison is unfair for a couple of reasons. First, George Gately's orange striped cat debuted in American newspapers five years before Jim Davis' finicky feline followed suit. Secondly and more importantly, the strip, which is now carried on by Gately's nephew Peter Gallagher, is one of the most insane, proudly meaningless, and defiantly absurd things you'll find on the funny pages.

Quite simply, Heathcliff makes The Far Side at its most opaque look like The Family Circus at its most obvious. While Garfield is about the relationship between cats and their owners and has some basis in real-life observation, Heathcliff is about pure dadaist lunacy and has its apparent basis in three-day-long peyote trips. The central narrative which emerges from the daily panels of Gatley's strip is that of a casually dictatorial cat who has both a family and an entire suburban community under his sway. Heathcliff is basically a totalitarian conceptual artist who routinely dons elaborate costumes, raises various custom-made banners, and creates large-scale outdoor sculptures, often out of garbage, as a means of personal expression. He is devoted to chaos for its own sake and will gladly cause massive public disruptions with his inscrutable behavior, even if it means bringing dangerous wild animals into his suburban environment.

Like the kowtowed residents of Peaksville, Ohio from the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone, the humans in Heathcliff have simply built their lives around the nonsensical whims of one all-powerful, mad deity. At most, they will flatly acknowledge or describe what the capricious cat is doing, but they will not attempt to stop him or alter his behavior. While Garfield noodges Jon Arbuckle for more lasagna, Heathcliff would be more apt to turn a swimming pool into a giant lasagna pan and then dive in headfirst, surrounding himself with the delectable noodles, cheese, and sauce therein.

Since Heathcliff can be described as a kind of cult leader whose authority extends to both humans and animals, I only thought it fitting that his comic strip should be authored by one of the most terrifying Svengali figures of the 20th Century, Tate-LaBianca mastermind Charles Manson. Toward that end, I have taken some representative Heathcliff panels and paired them with quotes from the notoriously verbose Manson himself. Please do enjoy.

They said it couldn't be aired: The lost Wayne Kotke segment!

It was bound to happen eventually. Wayne has crossed the line, folks.

Ain't I a stinker? Handsome, though.

I've been producing "Wayne Kotke" segments for the Mail Order Zombie podcast since September 2008, and during that time, I've used my few moments at the end of the show to experiment with all kinds of humor: morbid, irreverent, occasionally satirical, and possibly even tasteless. Surprisingly, considering this is the Internet, there's been very little negative feedback to any of this. Oh, there have been a couple of mild complaints over the years, but nothing too substantial. I think the key to all of this is that the MOZ segments are done in a lighthearted, all-in-good fun sort of spirit. The Wayne Kotke character is nothing if not upbeat. He's the eternal optimist, always sure he's onto the next great idea and totally unconcerned with the consequences of his actions. It never occurs to him that anyone could take offense at what he says. Over the years, I've been testing the boundaries of what people will accept from this character. Wayne has no real "filter," so he cheerfully admits to all sorts of bad behavior: copious drug and alcohol consumption, the sale of illicit substances (sometimes to schoolkids), insurance fraud, mail fraud, a whole host of scams and schemes, and many, many murders. I've sometimes wondered if anyone would ever take offense at one of these segments, but hardly anyone has.

Well, citizens, my luck finally ran out this week.

Garfield: No fan of Mondays

The hosts of Mail Order Zombie have deemed one of my "Wayne Kotke" segments too potentially offensive and/or controversial to air on their program. That's their prerogative, of course. It's their show, after all, not mine. I was surprised by their decision, however. The segments I do for MOZ are so intentionally outlandish that it's difficult to take them seriously. And besides, Wayne is just a fictional character. He's nothing like me at all. He only "exists" on the MOZ podcast and on this blog, though lately I've been ignoring him here and writing more personal articles. You may not agree with everything Wayne says -- I certainly don't -- but you can't really debate him because he's basically just a cartoon character. You might as well write a complaint letter to Garfield, informing him that Monday is a perfectly fine day of the week, thank you very much, and that you've never cared much for lasagna either. If I haven't made it clear before, let me say it now: Wayne is just a silly character, and the segments I do for MOZ are purely intended for entertainment, not as advocacy for any real world political or social issues.

However, the hosts of Mail Order Zombie felt that the following segment might offend members of the MOZ listening audience because it pokes fun at the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. The segment is completely nonpartisan, and I tried to make it as balanced as possible, but the hosts of the podcast still felt it could cause a problem for them. I can sympathize with that. But still in all, I did spend some quality free time writing, recording, and editing the damned thing, so I didn't want to just scrap it completely. With the MOZ hosts' consent, therefore, I am now posting the segment here on this blog so that you can listen and decide for yourself whether it goes too far. Warning: Mild political satire (with brief profanity) ahead!




So... were you offended?

I honestly and sincerely hope not. This segment, like all the others I've done for the podcast, was just a comedy sketch and not an editorial. My segments for MOZ tend to be about whatever I find funny or interesting at the time. The week that I wrote this (and by now it's about a month old), I was suffering from severe post-election fatigue and wanted to write something about that which was even-handed and took both sides to task in a gently humorous way. This segment was nowhere near my favorite bit for MOZ, but I still wanted it to be heard. If you listened to it, thank you. And if you were truly upset by it... well, there's a comments section below just waiting for you. Feel free to use it as you see fit.

The Funday Sunnies! Comics for the terminally depressed!

Celebrating America's richest vein of laughter and despair: Newspaper comics!

Hello, everybody!

My main man, Zomby, has been on a vision quest in Nepal these past few weeks, which explains his near-total absence from the blog. When (or if) he gets back, I'll be happy to bring you his further exploits. In the meantime, I thought I'd bring you a variety of Sunday comics, each one with the subtly dispiriting, downbeat antihumor of Zomby!

Enjoyment is not the proper reaction to these comics, per se. You really should be shaking your head and sighing deeply after each one.

Capitalist Cut-Ups

Ruprecht, The One-Armed Cat

Dennis the Fundamentalist

Only One Punchline!

The Dullards

Suburban Ennui

Creepy Love

ZOMBY: The week-long experiment begins!

You might be thinking, "That sucks. Where's Zomby?" Allow me to explain. Several years ago, I became quite fascinated by two ongoing parodies of Garfield. The more famous one, Garfield Minus Garfield, takes existing Garfield strips and merely removes the title character. The second, arguably more creative spoof is called Arbuckle and alters Jim Davis' original strips in two ways: the artwork is entirely redone (in a variety of styles by numerous artists) and Garfield's thought bubbles are removed. The basic point of both GMG and Arbuckle are the same: when you remove Garfield's wisecracks, his owner Jon Arbuckle is revealed as a deeply disturbed and lonely man.

Inspired by those parodies, I wanted to see what would be revealed if the title character were removed from Tom Wilson's long-running cartoon feature Ziggy. I found some of the results to be startling. Without its titular bald man, Ziggy became a record of a strange, surreal, haunted world where either: (a) characters rage impotently at no one, or (b) nothing happens whatsoever. Take a look:








I've been meaning to return to that world for a few years, and I've decided to do so through my blog all this week. Now, granted, today's cartoon isn't particularly suited for the Zomby Minus Zomby treatment. But I can only work with what I'm given.

And if it's any kind of bonus to you, all the cartoons this week will be in color. If this doesn't appeal to you, things will be back to normal by next Monday. In the meantime, try to appreciate these cartoons as opportunities for restful meditation.